WordPress version 6.0 is out. Hurrah! Except… it’s broken something.
Actually, things have been going wrong since long before then.
The last post I wrote, about Eurovison, I noticed that the Categories and Tags panel was missing. As I write it still is. I thought it was because WordFence was causing the bit of Javascript needed not to fire (that was in my tests yesterday) but that might not be the guilty party. It is an issue affected all of my sites though, so it will need fixing.
But the bigger issue is that when I start a new post/page or try to edit an old one, I get the White Screen of Death. The content loads but something stops the Javascript from firing.
In turns out to be something in my theme.
Infinity is an old-school homebrew theme, based on one theme with bits of another theme bolted on. One of those bits, the custom header graphic script, caused a problem, but that might not be the things that causes the WSoD.
But I quite like this theme and I’m not ready to let it go just yet.
So to write this post I have swapped to a different theme, after which I’ll swap back.
It’s a nuisance, but necessary. And it does make me think about what I want next to do with my theme.
The standby theme is Livro, by Automattic (the people behind WordPress). That means it’s suitable for full-site editing, blocks and the new way of doing themes, so possibly a good learning theme. I’ve cloned it and renamed it Livrox because it’s white text on black by default, so I changed the colours around. This is the old school way of doing things with themes but it still works.
What I need is a really good tutorial on how to write the new theme.json file which seems to replace the perfectly good .css files that we used to use. And an understanding of how new theme templates are supposed to work; in the general settings I have Show Excerpts set but I still get the full post displayed.
Or, perhaps… even though it now apparently powers 43% of the Internet, I ought to look for a WordPress alternative…?